User-Centered Information Design Workbook

Determine Your Purpose:

Actions: Write a Preliminary Purpose Statement Plan Questions for Sponsor/Stakeholder Interview Sponsor/Stakeholder

Results: Revised purpose statement Project plan Timeline Draft Team Plan

Analyze Your Audience:

Actions: Meet your users Conduct Interviews Ethnographic/Field Studies Think-Aloud Protocol	Results: User profiles Task flows Personas Scenarios Revised purpose statement
Actions: Review results with sponsor and selected users	Results: Approved purpose statement and user information

Develop the Content:

Actions: Gather information Document Sources Worksheet Test topics and labels Clump and label the content Determine your information types	Results: Refined clumps and labels
Actions: Define a structure for your site	Results: Navigation Plan

Develop look and feel:

Actions: Plan simple, cohesive site and page design Write a simple style guide Mock up paper prototypes

Results: A style guide A first draft or two Considerations about look and feel: Accessibility, Graphics, Multimedia, Writing Style

Revisit:

Purpose statement, user profiles, task flows and scenarios

Actions: Test your prototypes with: Cognitive walkthrough Heuristics (CAPE Checklist) Think-aloud protocol

Results: Go, no-go decision

The techniques below are used at various times in the design process - from the beginning to the end

Actions:	Results
Informal usability testing	Simple tests, early on in the project, point out misconceptions, ideas that won't work and helps identify problems
Formal usability testing	Identify problems, inform your judgement about choices
Expert review	Identify problems and suggest changes
Test again! and again!	Testing is an iterative process: make something, test it, fix it and test it again!

Actions: Narrow the focus and decide where to start Maintenance task list

Results: A well-designed web page!!

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Last Updated: May 10, 2001